Mozilla lays off 70

Brendan Eich has a helpful chart of Compensation of Highest paid executive at Mozilla vs Firefox market share over time.

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584/p...

Seems odd in his tweet he noted he was unable to get funding in the valley for Brave. The guy created JavaScript and was a creator of Firefox. Don't get it ..as JS alone has contributed like how much to world economies, as well to almost every HN reader's wallet/bank.

He didn’t not support gay marriage, he actively gave money to oppose it. That’s a little different.

It doesn't matter - it's legal, protected political speech in donation form. There's nothing wrong with having differing opinions about things; you can disagree as much as you like and donate as much as you want to counter it.

You're right, it absolutely is. The corollary to this is that no one has to hire him/work with him; they're allowed to fire him for his legally-protected speech. I don't agree with how it was handled either, but we must protect their freedom to act as they choose as much as Mr. Eich's freedom to speak as he chooses.

You've been downvoted; I sympathize. While you stick to "speech", I think you miss two things, one about speech and the other from a different area of law:

1. Free speech is not just a U.S. 1st Amendment issue, and who cares what else goes wrong at subsidiary levels. From the Committee for the First Amendment (Humphrey Bogard had to disavow under HUAC pressure; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_the_First_Amendm...) on, depending on whose ox was being gored, both left and right have decried "chilling effects" of less than federal censorship effects on free speech. Cory Doctorow had a good piece on this recently:

https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-for...

Cory covers the full space, including corporate censorship of dissidents of all political stripes, corporate capture via monopolies and market super-powers, etc. Recommended.

2. California has labor law from the New Deal era, which protects employees from being fired or demoted due to political affiliation, participation, or any action including speech:

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

So it's not just as simple as your downvoted post seems to say.